Jay Ward

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Early life Jay Ward was born He was raised in Berkeley, California, attending Frances E. Willard Intermediate School as "J. Ward".

He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1947, he obtained his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Early career In 1947, the first day that Ward opened his first real estate office at the corner of Ashby and Claremont, a runaway truck crashed through the building and pinned Ward. While recuperating, Ward decided to animate cartoons, but kept his real estate business, later moving it to Domingo Avenue and then Tunnel Road, where it stayed, in Berkeley, even after Ward moved to Los Angeles. He later received incorrect medical treatment while hyperventilating in an airplane. He then developed agoraphobia.

Rocky and His Friends premiered in the late afternoon,

As a running joke, many of Ward's cartoon characters had the middle initial "J." The cartoonist Matt Groening later gave the middle initial "J." to many of his characters as a tribute to Jay Ward.

Ward fought many heated battles over content with the network and sponsor. The "Kirward Derby", a bowler hat that made everyone stupid and Bullwinkle a genius, was named (as a spoonerism) for Durward Kirby, sidekick of the 1950s and 1960s TV host Garry Moore and the co-host of Allen Funt's Candid Camera. When Kirby threatened to sue, Ward quipped, "Please do! We need the publicity!"

Ward died of renal cancer in West Hollywood on October 12, 1989, and is buried in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery.

Legacy The offices of Jay Ward Productions were located across the street from the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip. In 2007, the building could be identified by a statue of Bullwinkle and Rocky, located in front. In 2013, the statue was reported by the Los Angeles NBC affiliate KNBC to have been removed from its location by DreamWorks Animation, which previously owned the licensing rights to the Jay Ward catalogue. DreamWorks Animation had stated that they intended to restore the statue as soon as repairs were completed on it; however, as of May 2014, the statue's whereabouts and status were unknown. It had been speculated that DreamWorks intended to relocate the statue to its own headquarters. In late 2014 (ran until 4 January 2015) the statue was temporarily housed at the Paley Center for Media, in Beverly Hills, California, in conjunction with "The Jay Ward Legacy Exhibit". The Jay Ward family gifted the refurbished statue to the City of West Hollywood as part of its Urban Art collection. On Feb 28th, 2020, the Bullwinkle statue finally received its permanent home when it was installed on the island at Sunset Blvd. and Holloway Drive, right across from where Tower Records and Spago had been.

Following Ward's death, Alexander Anderson Jr., who had created the initial conceptions of the characters Dudley Do-Right, Bullwinkle and Rocky, but had not received public recognition, learned the characters had been copyrighted in Ward's name alone. or 1996 (sources differ), Anderson received a financial settlement and a court order acknowledging him as the "creator of the first version of the characters of Rocky, Bullwinkle, and Dudley." as part of the publicity for the live-action and animation film The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Until it closed in July 2004, the Dudley Do-Right Emporium, which sold souvenirs based on Ward's characters and was largely staffed by Ward and his family, operated on Sunset Boulevard.